A few months ago, we had the pleasure of interviewing Yin Lin and Lisa Wang, cofounders of SheWorx, the global collective for ambitious female entrepreneurs who are committed to building successful, scalable companies. And if scaling is any evidence of success, SheWorx must be doing something right: in just 18 months since its launch, SheWorx has reached more than 20,000 female entrepreneurs in seven cities around the globe.

The panel was outstanding, not only because of the caliber of the panelists and the moderator, but because of how well it was organized: Alicia Syrett of Pantegrion Capital is to be lauded for coordinating a series of discussion points that led the panelists through a coherent story, to help the audience understand key aspects of fundraising. We have attended dozens if not hundreds of similar panels, which more often than not come across as a semi-random collection of personal reflections and platitudes. In contrast, we felt that the panel could have been recorded and transcribed into a self-contained guide for entrepreneurs.

The panelists brought some serious star power that offered a panoramic view of key elements of the startup funding space. Joanne Wilson of Gotham Gal Ventures anchored the panel with her unparalleled experience as an Angel Investor. Her presentations are always full of gems, and she got a particularly heartfelt ovation when she mentioned that roughly 70% of her portfolio companies include women or underrepresented minorities on the founding team.

Katherine Hill Ritchie of Private Capital Investments gave the audience an understanding of what it’s like to raise capital from family offices. Aside from providing insights into a source of funding that is often overlooked by early-stage entrepreneurs, she made an insightful observation that with women often outliving their partners and inheriting family wealth, an increasing amount of private wealth will be managed by women in coming years, and these women will likely be much more interested in investing in female founders.

Pelli Wang, a Principal at SeedInvest, shared some impressive numbers about the caliber and class of investors who can be reached through equity crowdfunding, and helped to clarify some of the main features of this relatively new type of financial support available to startup founders.

The “high end” of the spectrum was represented by Hayley Bay Barna, whose amazing success as cofounder of Birchbox led to her current role as Venture Partner at First Round Capital. Although First Round makes a significant number of investments at the earliest stages of formation of a company, it is different from the other represented funding sources because of its obligations to the Limited Partners whose funds they are investing.

The panel discussion was followed by parallel breakout sessions. Here, too, Lin and Wang proved the popularity of their platform by being able to attract many respected members of the New York investment community, including representatives of noted investment groups such as Greycroft, ff Venture Capital, BBG Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, KECVentures, Harlem Capital Partners, BDMI Fund, Rubicon Venture Capital, and many more.

But the real genius of the SheWorx inclusion strategy showed in how they structured the breakouts: rather than the traditional competitive pitch session, the crowd was split up into small roundtables, each led by an investor or seasoned entrepreneur, where participants could discuss a range of topics, ask questions, and – most importantly – make a direct connection with someone who could help them or make introductions to other prospective advisors or investors.

And this brings us to a key observation about SheWorx events in general: the tag line for the SheWorx 100 Summit is “Let’s close the funding gap by collaborating, not competing,” an ethos reflected in the nature, content and tone of the event.

There are other, palpable differences between the SheWorx100 Summit and most of the other events in which we have participated: from the presenters, who are looking to share their experiences and genuinely offering help rather than bragging about their success; to the moderators and organizers, who are clearly more interested in putting together a well-organized, meaningful program than simply showing off their ability to attract star power; to the audience, who seem genuinely interested in helping other people they met, rather than simply hoping to collect business cards from a bunch of investors.

The result is refreshing, as it gives the entire event a much more amicable, friendly atmosphere in which the participants get to learn new things, explore new ideas and meet new people. And the attendees feel that they are contributing to the overall success of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

We believe the future demands a new mindset in which diversity and inclusion are explicitly linked to the success of organizations. Our goal in the work that we do and in writing this blog is to support the leaders who challenge conventional wisdom in order to create world-...